Genie X
by Julia456
Summary: Post 'X23'. The world will never understand.
1. Father

Disclaimer haiku: I don't understand/ And am glad of it; oh, and/ I don't own. Don't sue.

Notes: I won't go into details, but Genie was discovered in 1970, in California, and presented a truly horrific case of child abuse, lost scientific opportunities, and general disservice to the girl. I strongly suggest looking up more information because I can't do Genie's story justice here.

When I saw "X23" the other week, I immediately thought not of Mary Sues, but of Genie. And this fic, while not quite turning out the way I'd planned, began there. The "chapters" are really separate stories, but they all fit under the same umbrella theme.

The quote in the summary is from the suicide note left by Genie's father. He was right about that, at least.

* * *

The world would never understand.

Despite his assertions otherwise, Logan understood only partly. He knew the portions of the story that he had lived through himself: the adamantium bonding, which burned and burned and afterwards felt maddeningly foreign in a body that had never suffered an invasion before; the endless days of heavy combat training, grueling even to someone who had a healing factor and superhuman endurance; the atmosphere born of shadow agencies, black governments, under-the- table military operations, where the paranoia and uncaring were so thick you gagged on them with every breath; and the wild exhilaration of breakout, slicing and stabbing and running and fighting without concern for the bullets being fired at you in your final bid for escape.

He understood that much. But the rest of X23's life was a mystery.

SHIELD and HYDRA's Mengele of a scientist, that Dr. Risman, could show him footage and quote him data until the sky fell in, but that told him nothing about the girl herself. How her mind worked, what she wanted most, what she feared most, what she saw when she looked at the rest of the world. A life with no childhood. He thought he could come close to understanding; his childhood was a long stretch of blank nothing, part of a mind that had been so wiped and erased and messed with that some of the memories were simply not there anymore.

He'd still _had_ a childhood, though. And he'd known love, and safety, and human contact. X23 had had none of these things.

And yet the girl had managed to grow a sense of independence, of identity, and had at last demonstrated the sheer guts to _live_ and change her fate and be more than a killing machine. To be human. To _feel_. Machines didn't cry from rage and frustration and undefinable longing.

Professor Xavier and Beast had become fixated on the developmental impossibility of X23. Isolated from birth, no emotional attachments, little human contact outside of fighting and killing, abused, neglected, systematically brainwashed... Beast especially had grilled him on the final confrontation: she spoke? what did she say? complete sentences? proper grammar?

He'd finally gotten annoyed and yelled, "It was a flamin' _battle_, Hank! I wasn't takin' notes!"

But the abruptness hadn't deterred Beast and Xavier from sitting down and discussing the matter ad nauseum. Logan had been pulled into their talk frequently enough to make it impossible to escape, and he'd been forced to endure the conversation even as it soared well outside of his area of expertise.

"Chomsky's ideas remain unproven theories," Xavier would say, and Beast would counter with, "His work and Lanneberg's is highly suggestive of a critical period for language acquisition," to which Xavier would make a statement of agreement or disagreement, they would ask Logan for some arcane detail he hadn't bothered to notice in the first place, and then the entire cycle would begin anew. They finally stalled out on a question of whether or not Genie, whoever that was, provided sufficient evidence for Chomsky's theory ("Curtiss' results would indicate-" "No, there are too many other variables..."). Thoroughly bogged down in a deep morass of intellectualism, they stopped noticing the outside world. Logan picked that moment to get out.

It was science that had created X23. Bad science, conducted by a greedy, overambitious researcher and funded by some of the worst in the business - Logan was no fan of SHIELD but HYDRA was pure evil - but it was science nonetheless. And the well-intentioned chatter of Xavier and Beast was still science. It changed nothing; X23 was still out there, lost and alone. It changed nothing.

Scientists couldn't understand. They were so far into the cerebral cortex, so far into the higher- order, rational world of abstract concepts and rarefied thinking that the old brain, the brain humans inherited from reptiles, no longer registered. Logan wasn't driven by rational ideas. At the end of the day you had primal instincts to kill or run. Confronted with those choices you had hate, anger, and fear, but not love, forgiveness, and justice. The anger and hate sprang from the fear and then turned on it, devouring it whole and leaving no other choice but an explosion of fury at the slightest provocation.

Risman had called it "instability". Logan knew it as a red veil obscuring the world and dividing it into selections of prey. Whatever it was, X23 had it. It shone in her eyes and glinted on her claws.

He understood that, too.

He walked through the hallways of the Institute, watching the kids playing and living in relative safety, sheltered from the harsh laws of nature by friends and family and the tight bonds of social interaction, of shared culture and expression and all those other human things, and felt more keenly the animal drive that separated him out. He would never fit in, not really. He loved all the kids, some more than others, but it was a thin emotion, a shallow thing that he could toss away behind him on the road if he wanted to, and sometimes he did.

If X23 had stayed, it would've been like that for her. Always the outsider among outsiders, a lone wolf temporarily lurking around a pack, living too far inside the reptile brain to really connect with the higher-order children.

And he hated that. He hated it _for_ her, that she could never get back what was rightfully hers, what HYDRA had stolen from her. Stolen irrevocably when they'd put her through the Weapon X process - a euphemistic way of describing a form of agonizing torture made survivable only by a healing factor. He'd wanted to die. One of the few times in his life he'd so wished. And he'd been a fully grown adult with, presumably, years of combat experience behind him. To imagine that visited on a child... a child treated worse than a lab rat...

The anger flashed over again, spilling red everywhere, and he left the house at a deliberate walk that became a run, out into the night, not following X23's faint, lingering scent in case someone from SHIELD was watching. Just running out the anger until every tree within arm's length had three new, sap-bleeding gashes striping its trunk. Some of the trees had two gashes already laid across them - X23's signature, when she had passed through here in, maybe, a similar rage.

X23. The kid didn't even have a _name._

The kid. No, not "the" kid. _His_ kid. His DNA. But not a clone. She wasn't a clone. Clones were identical, and she was clearly different - starting with gender - but too much the same. She was a child, conceived in a petrie dish, born in a cold steel laboratory. His daughter by proxy.

He didn't know if he had any children, any _real _children. Weapon X had seen to that, sending that chunk of time into the same oblivion as his earliest years. But he knew X23 was his flesh and blood. Literally. Family. And the emotion connected to that ran far deeper than his relatively superficial affection for the Institute kids. Family was everything. Even the reptile brain knew that; protect the family, protect your genes, save yourself in the form of your offspring.

He wanted to find her; knew he couldn't. She was like him, after all, and he hadn't wanted to share his first post-breakout days with anyone. Everything had been too raw.

"You shoulda stayed, kid," he said aloud anyway. His voice was swallowed up by the trees and the night and the anger ebbed away, slow and steady like the flow of blood from a fatal wound.

* * *

Sometime later, days maybe, he found Beast and asked him what the outcome of the great debate had been.

"We decided that the plasticity of the brain was the real issue," Beast said without batting an eye. "Assuming she wasn't taught to speak - and read, while we're at it, and I highly doubt both - by HYDRA, the healing factor X23 inherited from your DNA probably kept her brain 'young' enough to enable her to pick up language well after the critical period theorized by Chomsky. The really good news is, given her brain's extreme plasticity, she should be able to rapidly develop in other areas as well, now that she's out of those barbaric conditions. Twinkie?"

Logan grimaced at the proffered junk food and walked off with a curt, "No thanks."

His family. His flesh and blood. The same problems and the same unexpected side benefits. The knowledge was temptingly lulling, but he didn't fall for it. It changed nothing.

X23 was still out there, running solo with no shelter in sight. No one except Logan could begin to know what she had gone through, was going through, would go through when she sloughed off the worst of the killer and eased into the uncomfortable, ill-fitting skin of humanity.

And the world... the world would never understand.


	2. Mother

"My only crime is the pursuit of science," Dr. Deborah Risman said. Again. And again and again. Now that the director of SHIELD and Wolverine were off chasing down X23, the rest of the spy agency was lining up to persecute the girl's creator. They had welcomed her with open arms, made a show of treating her with respect, even brought Wolverine in at her request... but now she knew that had merely been to soften her up.

The SHIELD agent who was doing the bulk of the persecuting, a hard-edged man in his thirties who'd introduced himself as Gabriel Jones, countered the latest cry of innocence with, "Not the creation and destruction of twenty-two children?"

Risman pinched the bridge of her nose in a futile attempt to ease a monstrous headache. The fluorescent lights, reflected as they were off of a thousand steel surfaces, were killing her eyes. "They never survived gestation."

"Lucky them," Nick Fury said, entering the room with all the force and menace of a lurking black shark. "Jones, I'll take over now."

Jones nodded and left, but not before giving Risman a glare overflowing with disgust and hate. She endured it silently, too sick at heart to be anything but sick at heart.

"Wolverine subdued the girl but couldn't hold her," Fury said, swinging a chair out from the gleaming metal table and settling into it like he owned the place - which he did, for all intents and purposes. "We lost her in the city. Smart kid."

"Urban combat was one of the most extensive training programs." Risman was twisting her fingers in her lap, over and over and over, and forced herself to be still. She gave a short, rueful laugh. "X23 loved it."

"I'm not surprised. Got her out of the white room."

Risman shook her head, slow and weary. "We used the white room for behavior modification only."

Fury leaned back and evaluated her over the table. "Which makes it okay."

She just shook her head again. He didn't understand.

"I've seen footage of Wolverine in sensory deprivation environments," Fury said. The flat black gaze of the eyepatch was equally unnerving as the single good eye he focused on her with unblinking intensity. "No sound, no smells, no visual... They go crazy after a few hours, don't they. Either that or drop into catatonia."

Risman bristled. "I never _liked_ putting her in there!"

"But you _did_ put her in there." Fury stood up abruptly, pushing back his chair. "Come on, Doctor. I think it's past your bedtime."

Risman hesitated, then got to her feet, pulse quickening in the fear that this was it, they were going to start... doing whatever they had planned to do to her. She pushed her own chair in before slowly moving to join Fury.

He led her out of the room, into one of the corridors jammed with equipment, security features, and armed guards. Even X23 had not penetrated this far into the building, and she had gone further than any other operative in HYDRA history. The slashed walls and incapacitated guards were proof of that.

Two of the guards fell into step behind her. They entered a secured elevator and rode down an unknowable number of floors - there were no lights or chimes here - and exited into a corridor that looked remarkably like the one they'd just left. The only difference was that this hallway was lined with doors. Blast doors, set into the wall about six feet apart.

"What's going on?" Risman asked, but was summarily ignored. One of the guards prodded her forward, close on Fury's heels. The SHIELD director stopped in front of a blast door halfway down the corridor.

He keyed open the door and it slid back with a hiss. "Here we are. Your new home away from home, Dr. Risman."

She peered inside; it was a cell perhaps ten feet deep and four wide. An inset light glowed overhead, protected by a close-woven metal grill. Aside from a bed and a sink, there wasn't any furniture, and the mirror above the sink had the dull sheen of bulletproof glass.

"No," she said, backing away. The guard stopped her motion after only a few steps. "No, I'm not staying here."

"You used to work for the bad guys," Fury said. He produced a toothpick from somewhere and stuck it in his mouth. "Now you've run to their sworn enemies. Us. And we both know that if you step outside SHIELD headquarters, you're a dead woman."

"I refuse to be treated like a prisoner!" she exclaimed in indignation, crossing her arms and scowling even as she quailed at the prospect of certain death. "I am a _scientist_."

"You're a heartless monster," Fury said swiftly, with such genuine anger that Risman shrank away. "You experimented on human infants, violated international law, and committed atrocities out of greed and ambition. I don't have to do anything for you. My guys want me to drop you at HYDRA base and tell 'em, 'she's all yours'."

Risman swallowed at this bald-faced declaration of malice, but she found with wherewithal to say, still defiant, "So why are you keeping me?"

Fury removed the toothpick and examined the tip. "Because you used to work for the bad guys. HYDRA's a hard nut to crack. And you know how much a good double agent costs?"

She shook her head, knowing that it was a rhetorical question.

"A lot more than an interrogation team and a bodybag." He replaced the toothpick in his mouth, regarding her with that uneven, unnerving stare.

Reality washed cold and quick through her veins, freezing her out with desperation. She'd run straight to SHIELD when she'd heard X23 was loose, knowing they could do more to find the girl than HYDRA. She'd run, clutching nothing but the contents of her office computer and the foolish dream that she could continue her work with X23 at SHIELD. Ultimate warriors didn't come along every day, right?

Instead she was faced with the truth that SHIELD saw X23 not as a warrior, but as an abused child, and harbored no warm feelings towards the person who'd brought the girl into the light. "You're going to kill me," she said. Her voice wavered only slightly.

"That's one option. Frankly, I think we'd profit more with you alive, but you know, the assistant directors -" Fury broke off with a one-shouldered shrug. "A lot of them have children of their own. They're having a hard time understanding how you had fourteen years' worth of chances to help that girl and you didn't do a single thing."

"What was I supposed to do?" she demanded, tears pricking at the corners of her eyes. "If I made waves they would've pulled me from the project! You don't understand - the project supervisor, Dr. Essex, didn't care about her at all. I _had_ to be there," she said, firm in her convictions, knowing she had made the absolutely correct decision. "There were _no other options_."

"You could have," Fury suggested with icy quiet, "come to us fourteen years ago."

And for that Risman had no answers. None whatsoever. She closed her eyes, feeling sucker- punched, and walked blindly into the cell where she would be spending the rest of her life, which might be short, or which might be agonizingly long. Standing in the middle of the small space did not make it seem any larger.

"Someone will be down in a few hours to start the debriefing," Fury said behind her, and she turned around to face him. He was standing in the open doorway with one hand poised to key it shut. "Debriefing" was a polite way of saying that she would either spill her guts voluntarily, or come under some not-so-subtle persuasion.

"I'll be ready," she said, defeated. She sat experimentally on the bed and found that it was rock hard. The blanket was thin; no match for the constant 70 degrees Fahrenheit of the room. She would spend the rest of her life shivering.

"You ever give her a name?" he asked unexpectedly. "A real name, not that designator garbage."

Risman mustered a faint half-smile that faded out almost immediately. He didn't understand at all. She realized with a final, despairing insight that no one could understand. No one in the entire world would ever understand. "No, I didn't."

Fury nodded, looking as though he really hadn't expected anything different, and said, "Maybe you should start thinking about one."

The door slid shut with an echoing finality, and Dr. Deborah Risman found she could not cry.


	3. Daughter

She stands at the place where sand becomes water.

The ocean rushes over her feet, hisses a retreat, rushes, retreats, rushes, retreats...

She ran here, ran north, until she crossed into a country called "Canada" and found this place, where sand becomes water, and she stopped here as a thunderstorm rolled in. A forest crowned with rocks is at her back and the ocean is before her, churned by wind, faded by the dark clouds to gray-green, the color of old bottle glass. It rushes, retreats, rushes...

She feels the rain spattering on her face, cold, lashing her with a million tiny drops. Her hair is plastered to her head, her clothes soaked through, and she is freezing straight to her bones. Her boots are sinking further into the soft, sucking beach sand with each moment. But she stays.

She has no name, no family, no childhood, no past, no future. She has nothing but six metal claws. She is free but even that is tempered by pursuit. She is alone because no one will ever understand what she is, what she really is, what lies in her heart and burns in her mind.

Anger stirs within her and dies, stirs and dies, and the rain strikes her face in a relentless patter, and at her feet the ocean rushes, retreats, rushes, retreats, and turns sand into water. She is changing too and doesn't want it, and she does, and she doesn't...

She is free, yes, she is free and if the pain inside her chest only grows by the moment she will never be able to explain it. And if the water on her face is tears then nobody will ever know what they are for.

She is Weapon X23 but she is not. She is sand becoming water becoming sand becoming water... changing and not changing... rushing and retreating...

The world will never understand.

**END**


End file.
